Nvidia Reveals Beastly $1,200 Graphics Card with Mac Support

Nvidia announced a new flagship graphics card on Thursday — the $1,200 Titan Xp. Now, normally, the unveiling of a powerful new graphics card is more likely to make PC owners, not Mac owners, excited. But the Titan Xp GPU is different because, for the first time, Nvidia is making its Pascal cards available for Mac platforms with a host of new beta drivers, which are expected to be released this month. When they drop, the drivers should make any graphics card that use the Pascal architecture compatible with Macs equipped with PCI-e slots.

“For the first time, this gives Mac users access to the immense horsepower delivered by our award-winning Pascal-powered GPUs,” Nvidia said of the new card. The Titan Xp, in particular, is what the company calls the “world’s most powerful graphics card.” It features 12 gigabytes of GDDR5X memory that can run at 11.4 Gb/s, 3,840 CUDA cores running at 1.6Ghz, and 12 FLOPS of processing power.

For Mac users who don’t quite need the sheer power of the Titan Xp, Nvidia’s upcoming beta drivers will also allow any other Pascal-based graphical processing units to be Mac-compatible. This includes Nvidia’s GTX 1080, which is quite a bit cheaper. Overall, this is especially good news for owners of older Mac computers or “hackintosh” (macOS running on non-Apple hardware) machines.